Category Archives: April
Jack and the Beanstalk
We are reading Jack and the Beanstalk this week. Here are some of the activities we completed today:
First, we sorted eggs that Jack’s golden egg laying hen left us. She also left us a note, but I can’t find the picture of that! 🙂 She basically asked us to take these eggs and sort them. We sorted them face down, so none of the children could see the letters written on their friends eggs. They had to sort strictly on size. We then turned all the eggs in that group over to see how close we were.
Next, we completed this sheet that has us sharing eggs with our friends:
Then, we created rulers (centimeters) and measured things at our tables:
We will be measuring other things with these rulers this week so this was just an activity to get our exploring out of our system! 😉 I’ll post more this week.
Kristen 🙂
Insects
All this week, we have been learning about insects. This was a new unit to me (I usually teach about them as they come up in stories or during teachable moments). I really could have done lots more with this idea than I did, but I was sort of pressed for time. I will probably come back in a few weeks and talk some more about them.
These are the books that I had out in my Library Work Station during our Insects theme.
This area has be come one of our Science Stations, I have since expanded to ANOTHER table! 🙂
One of the activities we did was to sort various bugs/insects/other backyard critters into categories.
This is our OWL chart right before observing the plastic critters. I had the children observe the critters and that’s how we fill out the “O” section.
One of the books we read…where we discovered that Insects are NOT bugs. I need to stop called all bugs, bugs, they have different names! 🙂
Even though this is not an “official” IB unit (we did Ponds), we all are continuing to have these large question marks up in our classroom to help us to remember to write down the great questions the children have so that as we are learning we can answer them.
Sorting clip art pictures of Insects/Not Insects. As I observed the children sorting in table groups, I heard some interesting discussions going on. The threw in some “tricky” critters as an assessment–we ended up having a great group discussion about where the worm, stag beetle, and caterpillar belonged.
Here we are discussing the stag beetle. Many children had counted his antennae and thought those were legs, so the children were having a discussion about that. It was really neat to see them listening to each others ideas without interruption, and coming to a class consensus.
The beetle and caterpillar ended up under Insect and the worm ended up under Not Insect (we will revisit this activity to see if there opinions have changed in the next few weeks).
I made a list of critters and printed them off from Microsoft clip art. We were reading The Grouchy Ladybug this week as well, so I tried to pull some things from that book. When I re-assess, I will put in more Not-Insects and several that we have named Bugs.
Kristen 🙂
The Grouchy Ladybug
We began our study of insects/bugs by reading The Grouchy Ladybug by Eric Carle. After taking a picture walk and reading it aloud to the children, we discussed the clocks that are pictured on most of the pages. The children learned that we would be learning about telling time and addition (with ladybug spots) this week during math.
I have several sheets that I will post in the next few days that deal with telling time and ladybug addition…so stay tuned! You can download pictures to sequence by going to my PDF page and searching for them–they will only download on certain computers (not sure why!!), and so far there is nothing I can do about it! Sorry! You can search on Google for images and print those out.
We also checked in on our beans that we planted last week and noted our observations in our Bean Journals: beanjournal (you can switch these so that the journals take up 1/2 of a page side to side instead of top to bottom like they are here).
Our Painted Lady Butterflies (caterpillars really) have arrived and are eating lots and lots! They have doubled in size since arriving last Thursday, so we will soon transfer them to our netting we have set up for them.
We also looked at our Scholastic News: “How Do You Know It’s An Insect?”.
I’ve got so many awesome ideas about Science floating in my head right now, and some ideas for Math Work Stations that I’m going to be working on this summer, so I’ll post as I think! 🙂
Kristen 🙂
Jack and the Beanstalk
Last week (yes, I’m a little behind) we read Jack and the Beanstalk, which ties in nicely to my seeds and planting theme. We began by reading Jack and the Beanstalk (the version by Little Golden Books). When we finished reading the story, we noticed that there was a large note hanging on our Morning Message paper:
The Giant had left us a message and some of his footprints:
The directions in his note were to find things that were the same length, longer than, and smaller than his footprints:
Tuesday, I gave the children plates of beans (the same ones from the previous week that they had already sorted). This time, I asked them to come to a consensus at their table about which 5 beans that their table would plant and care for. That was interesting!! We planted them in clear plastic gloves so that the children could watch them grow and change over time:
I asked the children to make sure that they all planted at least one lima bean and then asked them to consider these questions as they chose their beans.
Here they are hanging in the window.
I introduced the word hypothesis today and the children though about what kinds of beanstalks that their various beans would grow. Some one asked if there was a way to see inside the beans.
Wednesday, I asked the children if they could figure out a way that we could see inside the beans. They concluded that they knew that seeds opened once they had been planted so one of the things that was used to plant them must be the thing we would need. We made a list of things (sun, water, soil, love, air) and checked each one of the things off on our list. We decided that we had planted seeds in soil on Monday, so that was taken care of. We held our beans up to our hearts and talked to them (love) and although that did not work, it was awfully cute to watch! We also tried holding the beans up in the air and nothing happened. Finally, we decided that our experiment to see inside the beans would involve sun and water. Our hypothesis was that one of these ways was sure to make the beans open so that we could see inside them!
We also decided to use our greenhouse rather than take the beans outside. Some of the children were worried that squirrels and other animals might take the beans and we would not see what happened to them.
In the greenhouse.
Soaking in water.
We determined when we would check on them and also wanted to write something down to show what we were doing:
Thursday, we noticed that the beans that were soaking in the water had expanded and cracked open, so we used magnifying glasses to check them out (I was at Science Academy, so there are no photos for this!! Sorry!)
The children then got to plant beans of their own to take home and observe.
Because we had quite a few steps involved in planting these beans, we made a list of “Lab Notes” so that the children could refer back to them if they forgot what to do next:
That was our week last week…now on to this week!
Kristen 🙂
Kristen's Kindergarten 